Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage

Recently when I located a couple really good eggcorns, I Googled the eggcorn word and found Paul Brians’ discussion of it in “Common Errors in English Usage” ( http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html). Since this reference is a potential source of other eggcorns, I’ve decided to sort through the index for items that might be of some use…

Re: Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage

A nice example of “staid/stayed” (your category 3) from the Times of London, no less:

“But tennis is now a sport that is struggling to attract the youth of many countries and a stayed and stuffy attitude does not help.” With reference to the permissibility of red knickers on female tennis players!

Re: Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage

Your observation is probably worthy of its own thread, fishbait. I simply sorted through Paul Brians’ book and tried to categorize the entries. In one sense, all the items in his book could be considered to be “found” already—except to the degree that the eggcorn term hadn’t been coined yet—so I personally didn’t feel I should hunt them down and claim credit for them. But you obviously located the eggcorn usage before you searched the forum for duplication.

I’d like to hear your take on the imagery. It’s probably worth elaborating.

Re: Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage

I did find the mistake by accident, and found your post through a search. “Stayed” for “staid” is no eggcorn, because they are variant spellings of the same word: “After dinner to the office, where we staid late, and so I home, and late writing letters to my father and Dr. Fairebrother, and an angry letter to my brother John for not writing to me, and so to bed.” Pepys’ Diary, February 1, 1661/62. The secondary meaning of “constrained,” and so “prim, proper” must come from corset stays and the like-perhaps the “stays” of ships, by which the masts are “stayed”-kept upright and in their proper place. It’s still interesting, because it seems that the same process, at least in some minds, has twice generated the same secondary meaning.

Re: Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage

I would question duck tape. I don’t think it has been definitively established that duct tape is the original. It’s certainly easy to argue that the T in duct has been assimilated into the T in tape but could be equally well argued that adding the T is an overcorrection. Dave Wilton discusses the issue on the Big List of his wordorigins site. I have also heard that duc(k,t) tape is useless for taping diucts. If this is true it could be construed as evidence that duck tape is the original and duct tape the eggcorn